Contemporary Life Quotes

• One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.

  Joseph Campbell

  Life, Humanity, Way

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.182, Anchor

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• Readers need to see themselves between the lines of the story.

  Karen Kingsbury

  Stories, Lines, Needs

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• 

  Artist - musicians, painters, writers, poets, always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.

  Billy Joel

  Artist, Sea, Perception

  FaceBook post by Billy Joel from Jan 28, 2014

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• I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

  Toni Morrison

  Thinking, Past, Way

  "Toni Morrison's Fiction: Revised and Expanded Edition". Book by Jan Furman, 2014.

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• No aspect of our contemporary lives has been untouched by women's work.

  Dyllan McGee

  Aspect, Contemporary, Has Beens

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• The basic question 'will I obey Christ 's teaching?' is rarely taken as a serious issue. For example, to take one of Jesus' commands, that is relevant to contemporary life, I don't know of any church that actually teaches a church how to bless people who curse them, yet this is a clear command.

  Dallas Willard

  Jesus, Teaching, Taken

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• It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times -- the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie -- seem attractive by comparison.

  Christopher Lasch

  Bourgeoisie, Peculiar, Horror

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• I write about the trials and triumphs of contemporary life - and often the readers see themselves between the lines of the story.

  Karen Kingsbury

  Writing, Triumph, Stories

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• In the creation of a garden, the architect invites the partnership of the Kingdom of Nature. In a beautiful garden the majesty of nature is ever present, but it is nature reduced to human proportions and thus transformed into the most efficient haven against the aggressiveness of contemporary life.

  Luis Barragan

  Beauty, Beautiful, Garden

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• The public examination of homosexuality in our contemporary life is still so coated with distasteful moral connotations that even a reviewer is bound to wonder uneasily why he was selected to evaluate a book on the subject, and to assert defensively at the outset that he is happily married, the father of four children and the one-time adornment of his college boxing, track and tennis teams.

  Sydney J. Harris

  Children, Father, Team

  "Saturday Review" Magazine, April 22, 1961.

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• All ideas about identity, of course, fit perfectly into the social media wonderland we live in. They seem to really connect. There's a science-fiction aspect to our contemporary life. What's virtual, what's real.

  Vijay Seshadri

  Real, Media, Ideas

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• It's one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.

  Sam Shepard

  Fall, America, Tragedy

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• A great part of the disaster of contemporary life lies in the fact that it is organized around feelings. People nearly always act on their feelings, and think it only right. The will is then left at the mercy of circumstances that evoke feelings. Christian spiritual formation today must squarely confront this fact and overcome it.

  Dallas Willard

  Christian, Spiritual, Lying

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• I think it has other roots, has to do, in part, with a general anxiety in contemporary life... nuclear bombs, inequality of possibility and chance, inequality of goods allotted to us, a kind of general racist, unjust attitude that is pervasive.

  Leonard Baskin

  Attitude, Thinking, Roots

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• I looked around at what my colleagues were doing, and asked myself, 'What relationship has it with what's going on?' I found there was a great distortion of contemporary life. Photographers were interested only in certain things. A visually interesting place, people who were either very rich or very poor, and nostalgia.

  Martin Parr

  People, Interesting, Photographer

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• To understand what I am saying, you have to believe that dance is something other than technique. We forget where the movements come from. They are born from life. When you create a new work, the point of departure must be contemporary life -- not existing forms of dance.

  Pina Bausch

  Believe, Dancing, Technique

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• I'm drawn to making movies about contemporary life. The reason I choose institutions is because they provide a limit, a boundary.

  Frederick Wiseman

  Limits, Boundaries, Reason

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.

  Gore Vidal

  Play, Fiction, Masturbation

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• The most difficult problems are naturally not involved in the search for forms for contemporary life. It is a question of working our way to forms behind which real human values lie.

  Alvar Aalto

  Real, Lying, Way

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• What need had the businessman to scribble or philosophize when he dominated the imagination of his time and the frantic materialism that was his principle of existence had become the haunting central figure in contemporary life?

  Alfred Kazin

  Imagination, Principles, Needs

  Alfred Kazin (2013). “On Native Grounds: An Interpretation Of Modern American Prose Literature”, p.52, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Since we're living with antibiotic drugs and chlorinated water and antibacterial soap and all these factors in our contemporary lives that I'd group together as a 'war on bacteria,' if we fail to replenish [good bacteria], we won't effectively get nutrients out of the food we're eating.

  Sandor Katz

  War, Water, Drug

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• There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.

  Oscar Wilde

  Ignorance, Modern Journalism, Giving

  Oscar Wilde (1969). “The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde”, p.393, University of Chicago Press

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• To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Independent, Punishment, Anxiety

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2001). “Flow: the psychology of optimal experience”

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• I suppose in our contemporary lives, our cumulative e-mails might constitute a kind of diary: that informal, moment-by-moment description of life as it goes by. . As I think of those notes now - what I wrote, what I said - it seems to me they danced across the surface just as my grandmother's diaries did - Anais Nin she wasn't, and I wasn't, either. Who is? Not even Anais Nin.

  Sue Miller

  Grandmother, Thinking, Diaries

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